Chapter 8

The morning had gone much like every other morning these past weeks — Meimi working through the same stance Hikari had first taught her in this yard, feet finding their positions with a steadiness that no longer surprised her the way it once had, though the deeper forms Hikari promised were still, she suspected, some distance ahead of her. The air had turned cooler these last few days, the first hint of a season changing, and Meimi had noticed herself dressing more warmly for the yard without quite registering, until this morning, how many mornings had already passed since Hikari first offered her the bokken beneath these same pines.

She lowered the wooden sword at last, breathing hard, and found herself turning a thought over that had been circling in her mind for several sessions now without quite resolving into words. It was not dissatisfaction, exactly — she had come to love these mornings more than she had expected to love anything so demanding of her body — but something adjacent to it, a sense that the forms Hikari taught her, however faithfully she practiced them, remained slightly foreign in a way her old training never had. Dance had always lived in her before she consciously decided to move. The sword, even now, still required deciding.

“I wish there was a dance I could learn that will help me understand the katas of sword work,” she said, half to herself, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist in the same unconscious gesture she had first watched Hikari make, weeks ago, before either of them had known how naturally it would come to sit in Meimi’s own body too.

Hikari, who had been resetting her own stance a few paces away, went suddenly still. “I know!” she exclaimed, the word arriving with the bright delight of someone who has just watched two separate thoughts collide into a single obvious answer. “Kenshibu! It’s a dance involving sword and fan!”

“I have never heard of it.”

“Few outside certain circles have, I think, though it is not so obscure as all that.” Hikari crossed the yard toward her, energy building visibly with every step, the same focused intensity she brought to a difficult kata now turned toward this new subject entirely. “It combines swordplay with dance and with recited poetry — verses spoken aloud while the performer moves through forms that echo the meaning of the words. Some performers use a fan in place of the blade for certain passages, to soften the movement, and then take up the sword itself when the poem calls for something sharper. I saw it performed once, years ago, at a gathering my father hosted. I have never forgotten it.”

“What was the poem, that you saw performed?”

“I could not tell you now, not with any certainty. I was young, and I remember the shape of it more than the words — a warrior’s lament, I believe, something about a battle long past and a man returning home changed by it. What I remember most clearly is not the poem at all, but the performer herself. She began seated, entirely still, fan closed in her lap, and when she finally rose it was as though the stillness itself had simply decided to become motion, without any visible seam between the two.” Hikari’s gaze had drifted somewhere past Meimi’s shoulder, caught in the memory. “I have watched a great many performances since, and a great many demonstrations of swordwork besides. I have never seen the two combined so completely that I could not tell, watching her, where the dance ended and the fighting began. I think that is what I want you to have, more than the forms themselves. I want you to stop feeling the seam.”